Writer

Mariam

Update: This year Rise Foundation have broadened their winter appeal. They are now distributing a wider range of winter survival goods, and are focussing on Iraqi orphans http://rise-foundation.org/winter-campaign-for-iraqi-orphans/

I met Mariam in Khanki camp in Iraqi Kurdistan. She was hiding behind a tent, scared of the crowds of other children fighting for boxes of toys being distributed by an American charity. Her expression, her eyes, were compelling and I took picture after picture of her. As I went for a wander around the camp, Mariam took my hand and came with me. When I prised her fingers off to use my camera, she put her arm around my waist.

Mariam took me to her family’s tent and I met her mother, father, several siblings and a few indeterminate relatives. I sat on a thin mattress on the bare floor of the tent as they gave me sweet, black tea brewed on a simple cooking stove.Mariam’s family, along with everybody in this particular camp, are Yezidi. On 3rd August this year, her family woke to the terrifying sound of Daesh (ISIS) entering their village. Mariam’s parents grabbed their children and fled to nearby Mount Sinjar. For six days, Mariam and tens of thousands of others cowered on the barren mountain, shivering through the cold of the night and sheltering from the fierce desert sun in the day. When their bag of rice finally ran out, Mariam’s father made the hard choice to face Daesh rather than starvation.

Khanki in the dry.

With hundreds of other families, they made the run from Mount Sinjar, jumping over dead bodies and praying that the Daesh bullets would miss their mark. With the assistance of Syrian Kurdish fighters, they made it to the border of Syria, and from there, to the north and into Iraqi Kurdistan.

Mobile phone footage of Khanki Camp after a day of rain. It has since been raining for a week.

They now share a tent in the informal part of Khanki refugee camp, just north of the Mosul Dam. This camp shelters over 120,000 Yezidis, but for those outside of the official camp (over half), there is little in the way of drainage or other essential infrastructure and I’ve just heard that with this week’s heavy rains, the worst since 1992, many tents have been washed away. Before the rains, I went back to Khanki and visited Mariam and her family for a second time. The sores on her face were worse – I’m told there’s an infection running untreated through all of the children in the camp.

Mariam’s little sister. A sweet, shy girl who huddled up to me in the tent and kept kissing my hand.

Mariam’s gentle, responsible older brother

This time her father told me that he was terrified of winter. The family arrived with only the clothes they stood up in and have no blankets, winter clothes or stoves to keep them warm – only a small cooking stove and some thin mattresses, which they bought with the little money they had, or were donated by the few small charities visiting the camp. He told me that he also worried about the children’s mental wellbeing. He wondered how a child who had had to run through fields strewn with corpses and body parts could move on from that.

Mariam’s family

Mariam’s father seemed to be a kind and intelligent man and I believe that he will do his best to support his children’s psychological wellbeing, but I don’t know how he and the hundreds of thousands of other people displaced by conflict in this region will keep their families from great suffering this winter. In between my two visits to Mariam and her family I spent time in the far north of the Kurdistan region of Iraq, where I walked the path along which Kurds fled Saddam Hussein’s chemical bombs in 1988. On the way, in the highest of the mountains on the border of Turkey, my hosts showed me a small area on a rocky outcrop, where upended rocks marked the graves of children who died of exposure on the cold mountain nights of this exodus. My deep fear, having visited people in Khanki camp and some of the 820,000 other displaced people living rough in Dohuk province, one of the coldest areas of Kurdistan, is that history will repeat itself this winter, and on a much larger scale.

Children whose tent washed away, sheltering under a single blanket. Photo by a camp resident.

The TV cameras have left Iraq in pursuit of Ebola right now, and it is unlikely they will return to the humanitarian situation here until people begin to die in significant numbers. I’m not prepared to wait for that to happen and so have partnered with the excellent charity Rise Foundation on a campaign to buy blankets.

Displaced people here need much more than just a blanket, but it is beyond our capacity to tackle the whole humanitarian disaster unfolding, and we feel that a blanket is the cheapest way that we can get warmth to the maximum amount of people. This is not just our assessment – blankets are also the number one item requested by both displaced people, and the authorities in the region. Blankets are also the safest way to keep people warm in tents. On 20th October, three children burned to death in Khanki camp when their tent caught fire after their parents tried to keep them warm. Rise Foundation are enthusiastic, fast-moving and efficient. They have guaranteed that none of the money you give to the #buyablanket campaign will go on the charity’s overheads, which are covered by a sponsor. This means that every $16 you give will buy a blanket which is big enough and thick enough to help keep at least two vulnerable people warm in winter.

The back of one of the disused buildings holding several hundred families. They have only two toilets between them and there are pools of green, stagnant water around which children play.

If we can buy 100,000 blankets, we can make a real impact on the 820,000 living rough this winter in Iraqi Kurdistan, whatever their religion or ethnicity.